Remembering Michael Sorkin, Critic and Activist
The wickedly funny Sorkin, known to many as Comrade, was a social justice warrior. He maintained perpetual outrage in the course of writing 20 books and hundreds of articles, honing his invectives for gentrification, Disneyfication, waste, and conspicuous consumption. We have lost a polemicist who urged us toward the best of our architectural principles.By Katie Faulkner, FAIAMay 21, 2020

Editor’s note: This tribute was originally
slated to run in the next issue of the Boston Society of Architects’ digital journal
ArchitectureBoston. On May 13, BSA/AIA announced that the journal is
being put “on pause.” ArchNewsNow.com is pleased to give Katie Faulkner’s
thoughtful homage to our much-missed friend a home.

Architectural criticism today is generally not all that critical. Photogenic
buildings are filtered through copious social media platforms, and you can
populate your inbox daily with superb images from all over the world,
pre-screened as noteworthy. But not much is said about the rest of the
buildings going up during this historic building boom. Nowhere is this more
evident than in Boston, where – apart from a few gems – we may be witnessing
the most unremarkable architectural expansion in the history of our city.

Most of us have accepted our impotence in the face of massive capitalist
expansion, and this was underscored when Michael Sorkin died on March 26. That
day, we lost a warrior. As a critic, teacher, and designer, Sorkin championed
social and environmental justice, wielding the power of architecture. He could
not suffer quietly those projects he deemed frivolous, wasteful, or vain. In
1991, he published Exquisite
Corpse: Writings on Buildings (Verso), a decade’s worth of acerbic
columns written from his perch as architecture critic for the Village Voice,
proclaiming that he was retiring from criticism to focus on his architectural
practice. So much for promises. He maintained perpetual outrage for 30 more
years, and in the course of writing 20 books and hundreds of articles, honed
his invectives for gentrification, Disneyfication, waste, and conspicuous
consumption.

An intellectual with a capacious vocabulary and dizzying facility with
history, Sorkin was wickedly funny. That made him accessible. Rereading his
articles (with dictionary at hand), I was reminded of the legendary architecture
critic Lewis Mumford, mixed with Seinfeld creator Larry David and a dash
of gossip columnist Liz Smith. Sorkin’s kvetching could swing in a minute from
the master plan of Chandigarh to his skinflint landlord to the latest gossip
among architecture’s in-crowd. He liked to occupy the margins of dissent. For
the now-folded satirical magazine Spy, he once riddled the TV-famous
architect Robert A.M. Stern for lending his brand to a glossy advertisement
promoting “patrician dwellings”: “Bob Stern. Bo Bern. Banana Fana. Fo Fern.
Fee Fi. Mo Mern. What is it about a name?”

Sorkin was not afraid to bite the establishment, be it developers,
government officials, critics, or his fellow architects. Woven through his
decades of prose was profound contempt for Philip Johnson’s iconic stature as America’s leading modernist. In All
Over the Map: Writings on Buildings and Cities (Verso, 2011), he opined
that Johnson was emblematic of everything revolting about architectural culture
and its “club-house conduct of architectural patronage.” From the late 1950s
through the ’90s, Johnson maintained a successful practice, influential board
seats (notably with the Museum of Modern Art), and was famous for holding court
at New York’s once all-male Century Association, dispensing prestigious
architectural commissions to (all-male) anointed up-and-comers. That Johnson
had been a known Nazi sympathizer was all the more galling.

In equal measure, Sorkin adored Jane Jacobs. His 2013 Twenty
Minutes in Manhattan (North Point Press) was a love letter to that
patron saint of his Greenwich Village neighborhood. Like Jacobs, he considered
the neighborhood to be the building block of a sustainable and equitable city,
with all the serendipity and diversity of humanity. In All Over the Map,
Sorkin outlined his admiration for Jacobs: “…the restlessness of her curiosity,
her rejection of disciplinary compartments, and for keeping up the fight to the
very end.” He could have been describing his own crusade.

In the span of his 40-plus-year career, architecture progressed through
Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, and Blobitecture to the current heterogeneity
of style that favors sophisticated geometries, material expression, and high
performance. Sorkin celebrated that architecture has never been more
artistically vital, but continued to feel that the profession is failing the
environment spectacularly. Many would agree. Half of global emissions come from
the building industry; 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty, and there is
an extraordinary housing shortage. Oft quoted by Sorkin was the presumption
that if everyone on earth consumed at the rate of the United States, we would need two additional earths. Right now.

All of this begs the question of the relationship between architecture
and activism. Every building should demonstrate a positive contribution to
civic life, and every building should aspire for net zero emissions. Who then
will call upon the stewards of the built environment? Who shall enforce architecture’s
implied Hippocratic Oath?

The notion that we would regulate ourselves (or one another) assumes an
altruism potentially in conflict with the survival instincts of the profession.
Never a commercial success, Sorkin was first to admit that his kind of critical
architecture fell into two categories: paper (i.e., never built) and
humanitarian, the latter demanding “Ghandian levels of commitment and
self-sacrifice,” as he wrote in What Goes
Up: The Right and Wrongs to the City (Verso, 2018).Architecture firms are businesses trying to maintain
profits. Thus, we may be unlikely to criticize the hands that feed us. Who
among us would forgo a choice commission at Hudson Yards in Manhattan or in Boston’s Seaport District in favor of criticizing its developments as skin-deep real-estate
grabs?

Here in Boston, there is plenty to talk about, but not much is being
said. The Seaport District, high-rise living, neighborhood overhauls, and
institutional expansions have put dozens of new buildings on the horizon. Are
they all so good that no one has a harsh word? In 2015, Boston Magazine’s
Rachel Slade came out swinging with an article titled “Why
is Boston so Ugly?” Citing projects in both Chicago and New York, Slade
wondered if we needed to go out of town to find designers who understood civic
legacy and architectural ambition. The article unleashed debate among local
developers, designers, and citizens. Boston real estate growth was being called
out as an insider’s game. Indeed, the city with its embarrassment of riches of
design schools and talented practitioners was fertile ground for such healthy
discourse. But that was five years ago. Who’s talking now?

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman took on Hudson
Yards last year in a rare confrontation, postulating that the all-star-designed
$250 billion development was a museum to Architecture and luxury branding with
the headline: “Hudson
Yards is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the
Neighborhood New York Deserves?” As a critic, not a practitioner, Kimmelman
is positioned to defend the public among the competing interests of money,
politics, and power. Not only does he translate the aesthetics, he holds the
developers accountable for adequate green space and other promised amenities.
Critiques like Kimmelman’s can change the climate of the discussion, informing
people who might otherwise not understand what is at stake. Suzanne Stephens of
Architectural Record and an adjunct professor at Barnard College agrees that criticism can change the climate of discussion for the better. She bemoans
the paucity of outlets for true architectural discourse. Not only are there
fewer architecture writers, there are fewer platforms from which those writers
can access the public.

In losing Sorkin, we lost a polemicist who urged us toward the best of
our architectural principles. Perhaps most remarkable about him was the
colossal energy to go beyond the page and literally practice what he preached.
A celebrated author, he had infinite job security in academia. Yet he chose to
persevere with both Michael Sorkin
Studio and the nonprofit Terreform,
with its imprint UR (Urban Research), and
with sincere ambitions to see his dreams come to life. After all, you cannot
write a building. Certainly, he’d have much to say and draw about our current
predicament of social isolation. Michael Sorkin is gone too soon. Fortunately,
he has left us to contemplate his yards of text and glorious depictions of a
better future.